One Word: 'Amplification'
26 October 2015

Yep, and here’s an explanation of why, courtesy of Jonathan Schwartz, the legendary radio personality and master of encyclopedic musical knowledge. A caller asked why he (Schwartz) felt Hendrix was the greatest guitarist of all time. Schwartz answered:

“One word: amplification.”

Schwartz explained that Hendrix used extreme, unprecedented amplification to help him bend notes, use feedback as key tonal elements, and generally blow the doors off the building like no one ever had before. It also allowed him to play with one hand, or if you prefer, with twice the agility and ingenuity of other guitarists.

So back to content marketing. If you focus your efforts on continually updating your site with relevant content, great. If you and your team publish three or four blog posts every week, great. Even if you’re already including data journalism in your content-marketing strategy, that’s great too.

But.

If you’re not channeling your inner Hendrix, your content may need more volume. And you can do this effectively and easily. But why should you?

Because people won’t find your content by stumbling across it by mistake. Every good content calendar needs an equally good content promotion plan. Otherwise all that content creation will fall upon deaf ears. Or won’t reach deaf ears. Or something. But you get the point. If you’re not sharing across multiple platforms and screens, you’re not plugging into those giant Marshall amps right behind you, dude.

And they really are right there behind you. We've all become aware of the Paid-Earned-Owned media matrix. There’s a reason we all know about it: They work, when you use them correctly.

So, are you? Are you using Outbrain and Reddit and promoted tweets and retargeting ads? Do you have influencer outreach programs and aggregator-site placement programs in place? And are you incorporating your earned and paid assets into your owned media properties? Well, are you?

What’s that? I can’t hear you. You need to RAISE YOUR VOICE.

See what I did there?

Anyway, end of lesson. Just remember that you can make some truly beautiful music with your content (i.e., increased traffic and conversions), but you need to keep our man Jimi in mind. He may have said it best himself:

“I've been imitated so well I've heard people copy my mistakes.”

Make no mistake: Amplification. It’s simple, loud, and effective. So use it and you could be a rock star too.